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Life 2.0 – 2 Day Workshop, February 2019

$990.00 AUD

I post things about life n' stuff here, come check it out!

@amber_hawken
  • Do much more majestic words strung together exist? Thank you @elizabeth_gilbert_writer for reminding us of our very honest nature.
  • What’s ready to die and what do you need to keep fighting (as in, sitting in discomfort when we want to run. I don’t believe fight/hustle will ever get us anything worth keeping) for? The art of a full life lead from the heart and founded in strength, lies in knowing when to push through and when to pause and surrender with ease. Its grounded in a compassion that’s so subtle it’s almost silent. So subtle that it can only be heard when you’re very, very still. Humble, still, open and willing to admit you truly know absolutely nothing except that this moment right now, is it. And what you do right here with your thoughts and dreams and actions and fears will determine the next. Surrender to what’s right here, now. Sit. Breathe. Drop in. Listen. And then, have the courage to let go of what you fight and grasp onto because of fear and what you know you need to actually follow from a place of power. It’s determining the difference that’s a skill, developed over time and fine tuned from fucking up and learning from your mistakes. Soft in heart, sharp in mind and actions built from love. Our success is dependent on our ability to flow because, fighting, well it’s fucking exhausting and only brings us so far. Until of course we shatter and are forced to either give up (don’t do this) or rebuild from scratch. Life’s a balance of learning when to fight for those flash moments that require primal instinct, and learning when to strengthen through our softness of intuition. It’s our senses beyond our senses and our potential beyond our belief. It’s possibility of a fullness we can’t yet imagine but simultaneously know exists. We have to remember that we don’t know what we don’t know so remaining open is the remedy for sabotage. A self-screw-over you didn’t even see unfolding. Let yourself look a little closer. Let yourself get a little more uncomfortable. Let yourself open and wonder. It’s a magnificent thing, life; we get lost often. But it’s love that’ll always bring us home. Stillness, humility and the courage to practice both are the essentials. Ain’t that a beautiful fucking recipe? This is my recipient. What’s yours? @roshimccartin
  • We consistently underestimate our ability to change our life in each moment. Not because we’re incapable, ignorant, powerless or time poor; We literally just aren’t taught how. I have a theory and it goes like this: It's easier than we think to not fk up our life. Our ability to change our lives is directly proportionate to our ability to exercise self-control, and our ability to exercise self control is directly proportionate to our ability to focus our attention. I'm going to oversimplify some nerdy neuroscience stuff of mindfulness so you can appreciate that you, my friend, have the ability to shift your neurochemistry, biochemistry, emotional state, and thus turn into a confident feeling, calm being, empowered kinda human in just a few moments. Its so bloody beautiful (and why @calmmindproject exists) So there is life/people/events/food/stimulants, etc. (external stimulation), the thinking mind (internal stimulation), emotions (more internal stimulation) and our brain. Information comes in, the brain processes it and a world of neurochemistry fire off, changing our biochemistry, influencing our emotions and our emotions drive behaviours, and our behaviours, well, they add up to this thing we call, life. We have about 11 million bits of information per second coming in but our brain can only process about 50 of them. That means we literally only experience 0.0000045% of our life. Our brains have to use information from the past, or (very oversimplified) make up the gap by distorting, generalising or dismissing the 11 million bits coming in. Continued in comments... SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: #GOLDCOASTPARENTS - I'm speaking at @risesurfersparadise Wednesday 29th May at 6:15pm on Mindful Parenting. Spots are INCREDIBLY limited, so parents, head here to register your spot now. https://www.riseearlylearning.com.au/twighlight-landing/ 📸@ @roshimccartin
  • Most of my life I thought communication was about getting my point across; teaching something, saying something, contributing, and my most ugly habit, proving and defending myself. It's not. Communication is only something that happens when we get out of our own head and see the world through the other persons eyes...and feel them. We are feeling beings that think, not the other way around and this is why so much of what we say and hear is distorted. We can actually only mentally process 50 bits of the 11 million coming through (fucking WHAT? right, I know). The rest we just make up based on the past or what our brain generalises. This means, if we only hear with our minds, we don't really hear at all. When I started travelling the world about six years ago, I realised communication is so much more about feeling the other person. Without words, I had to sense, watch their motion, their face, their energy and I began to understand that communication is a magical form of connection if we use it to be with another human. To connect, empathise, hold space and allow them to express. There’s a load of science on this which I equally froth on. For those who feel they don't need to be 'heard', this might seem odd and even useless. Trivial, perhaps. But if you consider yourself a human, then you and I both know you still need connection and contribution to thrive. Know this, to listen, to feel and see the world of another by placing your opinions, knowledge, view, desire to be heard, respond or contribute aside and open the space, you'll experience the wholeness of connection simply by holding that space for another and experience that giving through being. In full. Listening is not about you (me). Its about connection. If we are in our head, we aren't listening, we are waiting to respond or work out how to be heard. Our head/ego is in charge and we sever true connection and sacrifice it for the sake of what? To be seen? To rebuild your sense of self with a response? It's an empty feat. Tip of the day, if you want to be seen, then take the time to place your head aside and really listen, feel another. FULL Blog link in bio 📽@genghis_tuan 💽 by @kateleopoldmusic
  • I get “notes from the Universe”, (stuff gets sent to my email and many thousands of others, I changed it slightly) and bloody loved today’s and wanted to share it with you. If you don’t know about The Universe Notes, go to tut.com and get on it. Always dishing out the gold ❤️🤟🏼 #theuniverse
  • What is it that makes us feel alive? How can we cultivate and create that without destroying our inner light along the way? Although many of us may think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel, biologically we are feeling creatures that think. We screw ourselves over by believing the latter because we tend to live our lives in order to feel instead of feeling our lives to live. Life teaches us hardness to be strong when really, we need to be soft to be powerful. If we don’t learn ourselves, how to soften, life will (rather fucking painfully) sooner or later, be forced to shatter you into a million little pieces. It’s when you’re soft that you’re strong and hard that you’re the most vulnerable to being cracked open and falling apart. Your pain, from the tiniest sting of a gentle rejection, the ache of sadness, ferocity of anger, heat of humiliation to the pangs of failure, they all deserve a certain kind of respect. If you resist it; rigidity of your breath, tension in your body and contraction in your energy, you keep the pain in while simultaneously expanding it through every fibre of your being until you become the pain. then you’re royal-ey screwed. But when we soften in our bodies, deepen the breath, open our energy and actually face the pain and feel it, we can begin to appreciate where it’s taking us - in. My curiosity about human beings; pain, love, trauma, neurology, biology, success, failure, happiness and freedom lead me to the same point over and over again. Go inside. Sit. Stay. Feel. Release. Surrender. Love. See clearly. Show up from there. Repeat. That’s where it all begins and that’s where it all ends. It’s what we are all searching for with our soul but getting distracted from by our minds. I fail regularly. I practice, learn, write, teach and fuck it up and then repeat. I think when we hear someone teach something you might imagine, “only they can do it, it’s not possible for me”. You’ll give up before you’ve tried. So know this. My mother taught me something very important in her very short life on earth. We’re all human, and each moment forgone of loving kindness is a living hell. Be afraid, show up anyway. Go in, go home-for you.
  • I talk about meditation, mindfulness & compassion a lot. But whilst being fundamental foundations to a deeply fulfilling life, they’re not enough. We have to be willing to deliberately take a close look at the little things we do that are seemingly harmless, that suck the life force from us, leaking our attention, presence and energy at a micro level. And do you want to know what happens when your attention, presence and energy is constantly leaked at a micro level? You feel empty. Eventually, this becomes a macro being-ness. A constant leakage and filling up of space. What if the next time your hand reached for your phone, or your mind went into overdrive about something you can’t control anyway, you just took a single breath & paused? Let yourself feel uneasy in that space of nothingness or uncomfortable emotion, & be cool with that. Notice how hard it is. This is where you need to start. Feeling paralysed? Notice procrastination kicking in? That’s a good sign. Resistance is good. It’s just fear of our own potential, that our mind cannot comprehend. A flow, a space of no limits, creative energy and fulfilment. Procrastination is an indicator. Resistance tells us what we have to do. Remember this single rule: The more we avoid it, the more you know for certain it needs to be done. Resistance is experienced as energy leakage in everyday life; distraction & procrastination. The more we give into shallow urges, the more distracted we find ourselves being in life, the more sure we can be that we are turning away from what fulfils us & what will allow us to reach a deep creative growth potential in our soul. When you push past and into the resistance, you don’t just stop. You don’t become unproductive when you are still, you actually hit flow – and that my friends – is where the gold of life really exists. That’s when art from your soul surges up and rises out. That’s when we trust without knowing, speaking without choking, act without fearing. First, we must learn to pause, sit in the in-betweens. Fear and resistance will always be there, the urges will always be there. The key is pausing before you take the hit. Being still is the fastest way to come to life.
  • Ever wondered what unconditional love looks like? You’re witnessing it. (Swipe pics) A room full of people who were strangers 60 minutes prior to this photo. With breath, presence, courage, expression, witnessing, holding, being and embodying home within themselves, 30 something Gold Coast entrepreneurs experienced what it was to go from the idea of leading through doing to leading through being. Everything the mind says from fear will never last. Everything the heart pulls you towards will leave a legacy. To be able to lead through inspiration you must be willing to go into the trenches of the parts of yourself you’d rather pretend weren’t there and embrace them front on. The mind is important, but it cannot supplant the heart. The courage required to remain open to the discomforts of being a human is far greater a feat than shutting down and stiffening into a “leader” who tells those what to do while sheepishly trying to cover up their imperfections. The harder you try to be something to anybody the less they trust you. And trust is the glue that holds a community together. If people don’t trust you, they won’t follow you...willingly. You can control through fear but know that as soon as the chips are down, they’ll choose themselves. If you want a team who would hold you in return, place your cards down on the table with humility and responsibility. This is not to say you lean on them, you simply never sacrifice connection through a facade for the sake of your own ego. Just be real with yourself. Vulnerability is simply and honesty about your intentions and limitations. Begin within. If you can lead yourself, face yourself, be with yourself, stay within yourself no matter what, there won’t be a person on earth not willing to trust you. And if you can gain someone’s trust through genuine connection, you can influence them. Influence trumps instruction every single time. If you can influence from the space inside yourself where you’re not afraid of your darkness, you can change the fucking world. Repping @calmmindproject Thank you @lululemonausnz for running this + @bsktcafe for hosting. Wearing @lululemon 📸 @roshimccartin
  • Love more, care less.
  • Dude, I’m in a massive cycle of deconstruction and mess and life’s still incredible. It can be like that. It can hurt and you can still feel joy. It can be hard and you can still be soft. It can be frustrating and scary and you still relax and let loose. You can be in the trenches and still holding space for others to rise. Its a tricky one but it’s possible as long as you can see. It’s like that. Tense and relax. Heal and support. Close and open. Tighten and release. Contract and soften. Pull back and lean in. We’re never just doing one, life isn’t like that. It’s always a push pull polarity for anything to exist, until it’s not and then it doesn’t. That’s pain in a nutshell. You’re either left or right until you’re not and then there’s not left or right; you’re just here. Thats why we exist. To learn to dance instead of fight or flow instead of control. It’s all we are ever really doing. We’re blind if we think we’re not in it and not in it at all both at once. There’s never just black and white, well except when we buy into the mindset rigidity. Then you’re fucked and it hurts because you’re fighting reality. And when you fight reality, you lose. Only every single time. When you want it to be how it isn’t, you’re holding on and everyone and everything becomes this absolute, “this” or “that”. Thing is, you and I, life itself, it’s not just day and night, full stop. It’s only day in Australia when in the Netherlands it’s night. Perspective is everything and the sooner we realise our truth is just true from where we stand and when we have no need for anyone else to see it from where we stand, you become liberated. Like - I hate tomatoes, I don’t need you to agree that they’re an evil fruit or vegetable or whatever fucking classification they’re amongst. I know that and as long as it’s not hurting you or me we’re all g. It’s when I need to prove to you, defend my argument, criticise you’re opinion, judge you’re perspective, feel victim to your outlook and actions that I lose. That friends is fighting life, fighting reality. Don’t do that. Don’t fight it. Here’s my current life moto if you’d like to borrow it: Love more care les
  • im going to talk about something very fucking vital to our joy and sense of freedom in life. when you chase enlightenment, per se, you quietly grow a deep sense of loneliness and inadequacy as the human being you are right now. lets place this in relevant social media context. its easy to post beautiful images with the perfect lighting dripping across the waves of our body. ‘art’, we call it. presenting a quote we read (or googled) from the bhagavad gita. its easy, and thats okay, nothing at all wrong with this. but ease in this sense is a suffocation, distraction and truly, turning away from whats much deeper and vaster in this world. ourselves. what is far more difficult (and paradoxically freeing) that many of us pull back from as a reflex to avoid discomfort, is opening to the very uncomfortable parts of being a human. our messy, dark, chaotic, childish, insecure, fear ridden, self centred, controlling, darkness. we want to get away from ourselves and try to ‘transcend’ the part of ourselves we need to love and embrace. what takes real courage is not a yoga teacher training, TD meditations or plant medicine, no. its getting close and intimate with our personal human history, our shadow sides and the imperfections we’d rather filter away through our curated artsy photography accounts and oh so delightful seductive silhouettes in rainforests because - #pachamama take this one in - when the focus is to “transcend”, to have “no mind”, to “be free” before we are willing to get well acquainted with the unconscious version of self that we hide with our conscious projection (the great and together person we are to the world), we are skipping a step. bypassing. to not be intimate with our humanness—to not be deeply and thoroughly acquainted with our conditioning and its core fears—keeps it undigested and unintegrated and therefore very much present in our world underneath the pretty photos and facades. whatever you dont want to be, thats what needs to be faced front on, open hearted. this work is rough as fuck. its frustrating. its fear ridden, anxiety inducing, its so damn uncomfortable because it requires falling apart and dying over and over again. Contd ⤵️
  • We’re all in this together. If I reject me then I reject you. If I reject you then I reject myself. Mirrors, they’re bloody everywhere. While this seems a little deep for a Friday, it’s pertinent with everyone’s crashing in burning of allllll of the parts of themselves, connections, habits, defensive mechanisms and beliefs that were chocking growth and freedom. I want to scream in the mirror “I fucking love you” a million times over until not just my cells feel it and know but, but so my great grandchildren’s do as well. Appreciate the vastness or deep embrace of our shadows and light is the work I dedicate my life to. So naturally the universe kicked my ass hard core recently, ensuring that ANY lack of integrity with my teachings was stripped from me. Quite painfully, really. That’s what happens when stubbornness comes into play. Strength and independence now have whole new meanings in my life and they look something like letting the universe swallow my shadows whole and laying on the floor in fetal position for six hours. That’s always fun to do. Compassion pours from me these days, expected when you are stripped to your core to face your greatest fears. Now life feels light. Like I’m navigating with a feather compass and my stubbornness and strength can be put to better use, like searching for the best coffee on Easter Friday with @darrenjbruce and @jesskraushar instead of protecting the parts of my heart that I didn’t even know where fossilized. Touché universe, touché. My point is, do the work guys, it’s icky, it’s tough at times, but it’s the reason we’re here. To walk each other home again, eh. Isn’t that fucking beautiful x

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